Wednesday, July 8, 2015

A market disruption caused by SDN is shifting margins from the legacy networking vendors to the channel, says Steve Garrison, VP of Marketing at Pica8. By tearing apart the stack and letting customers pick the applications, OS, and bare metal hardware, you end up with a customized solution where the channel has a key role to play.

Many customers might not have that expertise to pull that
together, but this is where the margin shifts from the legacy vendors to the channel.

Mirantis introduced its Unlocked Appliances for OpenStack. The single or multi-rack converged infrastructure appliances are pre-validated by Mirantis and pre-integrated by Certified Rack Partners

Redapt, a cloud-focused systems integrator based in Redmond, Washington, is the first Certified Rack Partner to deliver Mirantis’ inaugural appliance, Mirantis Unlocked Appliance for Cloud Native Applications. In addition to building and certifying the appliance, Redapt pre-validated the reference architecture in an engineering collaboration with Mirantis.

Mirantis also highlighted its Unlocked Appliance for Cloud Native Applications, which is a turnkey rack-based appliance designed for developing and deploying cloud native applications and container-based environments at scale. The first iteration is powered by Dell and Juniper Networks. Configuration can range from six compute nodes and 12 TBs of useable storage, to a full rack comprised of 24 compute nodes and 24 TBs of useable storage, and a maximum of two racks sustaining over 1500 virtual machines and 48 TBs of useable storage. Compute and foundation nodes are based on Dell R630 servers. Storage nodes are based on powerful Dell PowerEdge R730xd with dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 CPUs and Intel SSD-based cache optimized for high-performance storage. Mirantis OpenStack 6.1 provides the infrastructure foundation, and each rack includes two Juniper QFX5100s as the data path and one Juniper EX3300 for management.

“About 20 percent of infrastructure is consumed through the appliance form factor because it is extremely easy to set up and operate,” said Alex Freedland, Mirantis president and co-founder. “Mirantis Unlocked Appliances combines this ease-of-use with the openness and flexibility of OpenStack, delivered as a cloud-in-a-box. Our first Appliance focuses on the most common OpenStack use case - developing cloud-native applications - and will be built and shipped by Certified Rack Partners across the ecosystem.”

“Redapt is excited to be the first Certified Rack Partner, which enables us to deliver what our customers have been requesting for years: the flexibility and zero lock-in of OpenStack in a turnkey solution.” said Josh Lindenbaum, Vice President of Business & Corporate Development, Redapt.

“The architecture Redapt designed with Mirantis, with Mirantis OpenStack at the core, solves for the complexity commonly associated with OpenStack. Redapt will work closely with customers to assemble, deliver and install Mirantis Unlocked Appliances that will arrive in the data center ready to plug and play.”

Confluent, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, raised $24 million in Series B funding for its live data streaming solutions based on Apache Kafka technology. The founders of Confluent created Apache Kafka while at LinkedIn to help cope with the very large-scale data ingestion and processing requirements of the business networking service.

Apache Kafka, an open source technology created and maintained by the founders of Confluent, acts as a real-time, fault tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. It is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data and device instrumentation. Its key strength is its ability to make high volume data available as a real-time stream for consumption in systems with very different requirements—from batch systems like Hadoop, to real-time systems that require low-latency access, to stream processing engines that transform the data streams as they arrive. This infrastructure lets you build around a single central nervous system transmitting messages to all the different systems and applications within an company.

Confluent will use the Series B funding to continue investing aggressively in product development, adding new stream data management features to Kafka and the other elements of the Confluent Platform. The company is also building new stream processing capabilities that will enable analytical operations on real-time data streams, much like those available on standard databases today, for more static, slow-moving data.

"Because Kafka was born in the modern big data environment, it is designed to simplify the management of massive real-time data streams," says Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. "Confluent’s platform can also support hundreds of applications built by disparate teams and is scalable, reliable enough to handle critical updates, and features a stream-processing framework that integrates easily and makes data available for real-time processing. Co-founders Jay, Neha and Jun Rao have created a highly intelligent product and we are excited to support their continued growth."

“Kafka has been a labor of love and it’s been thrilling to see the technology mature and advance. We began working together on Kafka and stream processing in 2010, and now Kafka processes 867 billion messages a day at LinkedIn,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO of Confluent. “Today thousands of organizations are using Kafka and we expect in the years to come this will become a core platform within virtually every major company. Companies from all sectors are looking to evolve their data architecture to enable real-time stream data processing, and with the funding, we’ll be able to accelerate the development of the Confluent Platform to help companies best leverage the power of Apache Kafka.”

CloudByte, a start-up based in Cupertino, California, cited rising demand for its secure, multi-tenant storage solution for virtual environments. The company is working with partners to deliver containerized storage for Enterprises and Cloud Service Providers.

Recently, CloudByte announced that its business has accelerated, fueled by 12.5 PB plus ElastiStor Community Edition downloads worldwide. Also, the company is speeding up the next phase of growth and is responding to the strong interest in strategic partnerships.

“During our evolution to become a global brand, we have chosen to work with the best in delivering Enterprise Storage,” said Felix Xavier, CEO and Founder of CloudByte. “Our partners, in turn, have validated our patented technology and have chosen it as the best fit for their local markets.”

Orange Business Services Tata Communications announced a Network-to-Network Interconnect (NNI) agreement that enable Orange Business Services to expand its network footprint in India.

Specifically, the NNI will enable Orange to utilize Tata Communications’ 120 points of presence (PoPs), extending Orange Business Services’ reach to tier-two and tier-three cities such as Bhopal, Kanpur and Visakhapatnam. The increased domestic footprint of the Orange network in India is particularly suited to support the expansion plans of global multinational customers looking to connect to the farthest corners of India with robust and reliable network services, featuring global service level agreements (SLA) and straightforward billing.

It also includes access to Orange Business VPN – a fully secured and managed network solution that allows data, voice and video to run on the same IP-based MPLS network – from all locations covered by this network agreement.

Following its recent acquisition of Latisys Holdings, a colocation and infrastructure as a service (“Iaas”) provider, Zayo Group unveiled its updated cloud portfolio to now include private, public and hybrid IaaS cloud services in the U.S. and Europe. This encompasses high-performance, scalable, virtualized and non-virtualized compute and storage on a compliance audit-ready platform.

Zayo said this strategic expansion builds on the Latisys assets with additional capabilities from cloud platforms obtained through the AtlantaNAP and Neo acquisitions. Zayo’s portfolio of cloud services includes a host of value-added managed services that can be layered on to custom tailored solutions for added performance, security, scalability and continuity. These services include security services such as managed firewall, threat management and log management, performance services, such as load balancing, monitoring and database management and a variety of storage and backup solutions, including fully featured disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

“The rapid adoption of cloud services makes Zayo's expansion into this market a natural extension of our bandwidth infrastructure business,” said Chris Morley, COO and president of Cloud and Connectivity at Zayo. “Through acquisition and investment, we have built a set of private and hybrid cloud solutions that are compelling in their own right and even more so when combined with our extensive fiber and data center facilities.”

In January 2015, Zayo agreed to acquire the operating units of Latisys Holdings, a colocation and infrastructure as a service (“Iaas”) provider for US$675 million.

Latisys provides colocation and IaaS services through eight datac enters across five markets – Northern Virginia, Chicago, Denver, Orange County and London. Its data centers currently total over 185,000 square feet of billable space and 33 megawatts of critical power with the ability to expand. Latisys focuses on marketing to and serving approximately 1,100 predominantly medium to large enterprise customers with large storage, compute and data connectivity needs. The combination of high quality assets, innovation and accelerating market demand has driven a strong track record of robust revenue growth and margin expansion since its founding in 2007. The company generated Adjusted EBITDA of approximately $11.0 million for the three months ended September 2014 and approximately $4.2 million for the month of November 2014.

Zayo said the deal will expand its data center portfolio to 45 facilities within the US, France and the United Kingdom. Latisys provides zColo a data center presence in four new markets. Zayo owns and operates extensive metropolitan fiber networks across all of the Latisys markets, physically connecting each of its data center facilities. This will allow Zayo to sell fiber and bandwidth services to Latisys’ core set of enterprise customers, and to market new colocation and IaaS services to Zayo’s base of carrier and content customers.

Microsoft will record an impairment charge of approximately $7.6 billion related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia Devices and Services (NDS) business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750 million to $850 million.

The restructuring will result in the elimination of up to 7,800 jobs.

“We are moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant Windows ecosystem including our first-party device family,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.“In the near-term, we’ll run a more effective and focused phone portfolio while retaining capability for long-term reinvention in mobility.”

In September 2013, Microsoft agreed to acquire Nokia’s Devices & Services business in a deal valued at EUR 5.44 billion (US$7.1 billion) in cash. The deal included all of the Mobile Phones and Smart Devices business units as well as Nokia's design team, operations including all Nokia Devices & Services production facilities, Devices & Services-related sales and marketing activities, and related support functions.

At closing, approximately 32,000 employees were transfered to Microsoft, including approximately 4,700 people in Finland.

DigitalOcean, a start-up based in New York City, announced $83 million in Series B funding for its cloud infrastructure for developers of websites and applications.

DigitalOcean offers simple cloud hosting with all servers built on powerful Hex Core machines with dedicated ECC Ram and RAID SSD storage. The company notes that more than 6 million Droplets (cloud servers) have been deployed on DigitalOcean by more than 500,000 developers to date.

The funding round was led by Access Industries, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.